Pictures of really, really big hard drives

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Some seriously manly storage from the 1950s & 60s

Bryan Lunduke

July 28, 2023

What follows are pictures of hard drives.

Really, really big ones.

From the 1950s and 1960s.

For no other reason than simply because they look awesome. Enjoy.

1956: The IBM RAMAC

Check out this beauty. The first commercial hard drive. "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control": RAMAC.

See those platters? Each one is 24 inches in diameter. Two feet! And there's 50 of them!

Dimensions: 5' high x 6' wide

Weight: Over one ton

Total capacity: 3.75 MB

And here she is being loaded onto an airplane.

I mean... dang. What if that hard drive fell over? "How'd he die?" "He was crushed to death by a hard drive."

Here's a few more pictures. Because it's awesome.

The IBM 305 RAMAC, the First Computer with a Hard Drive: $10,000 perMegabyte : History of Information

1961: Bryant Series 4000

Here is a personal favorite of mine (doesn't everyone have favorite 60 year old hard drive models?): The Bryant Series 4000.

Dimensions: 52" x 70" x 70"

Total capacity: Variable (see chart below) -- up to 205 MB!

Seriously. Up to 205 MB. In the 1960s! How crazy is that!

But then you look at this picture below... and it all makes sense. Those are some big, stinkin' platters! 39 inches in diameter... and it could hold up to 26 of them!

I mean... whoah! I wonder what sounds that drive made when seeking and reading data...

1962: IBM 1311

The IBM 1311 packed in six 14" diammeter platters into a single "disk pack". And each 10 lbs disk pack was removable. Making this a removable hard drive system. Pretty nifty.

Dimensions: "About the size of a top load washing machine"

Total capacity: "2 million characters" or "25,000 punch cards" (this was heavily marketed at replacing punch cards)

IBM Archives: IBM 1311 head assembly

IBM Archives: IBM 1311

I tell ya.

They just don't make 'em like they used to.

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